Letter from an Unknown Woman (Blu-ray)

This is the love every woman lives for…the love every man would die for!
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Format:  Blu-ray
item number:  Q8DY
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Blu-ray Details

  • Rated: Not Rated
  • Run Time: 1 hours, 26 minutes
  • Video: Black & White
  • Encoding: Region 1 (USA & Canada)
  • Released: October 16, 2012
  • Originally Released: 1948
  • Label: Olive

Performers, Cast and Crew:

Starring &
Performer: , , , , &
Directed by
Edited by
Screenplay by
Composition by
Art Direction by
Produced by
Director of Photography:

Entertainment Reviews:

Fresh100%

TOMATOMETER
Total Count: 22

Upright86%

AUDIENCE SCORE
User Ratings: 2,609
Rating: 10/10 -- Its layers of interpretation and emotional meaning, combined with its impeccable style, yield an endlessly re-watchable film that changes, as film critic Molly Haskell observes, with time and with you. Full Review
PopMatters
Feb 2, 2018
Rating: 3/4 -- ...a women's picture that nonetheless turns on male chauvinism. Full Review
LarsenOnFilm
Mar 7, 2013
[Max] Ophuls' first personal project in Hollywood and he injects this exquisitely stylish romantic melodrama with his continental sensibility. Full Review
Parallax View
Feb 19, 2012
One of the greatest achievements in American film. Full Review
Combustible Celluloid
Nov 18, 2008
Rating: 5/5 -- One of Hollywood's, and cinema's, grandest and most emotionally satisfying tales of unrequited love and self-sacrifice. Full Review
Goatdog's Movies
Jul 5, 2009
Of all the cinema's fables of doomed love, none is more piercing than this. Full Review
Time Out
Jun 24, 2006
Ophuls' masterful balance of viewpoints allows the viewer to perceive the long flashback that constitutes the film's main body as both a literal embodiment of Lisa's romantic fantasy and a critique of said romanticism.
Sight and Sound
Dec 1, 2006

Product Description:

LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN is set in Vienna at the turn of the century, an era Ophüls loved and had used in LA RONDE and LIEBELEI. Joan Fontaine gives a moving, heartfelt performance as Lisa Berndl, a romantic young woman who falls in love with the handsome concert pianist Stephan Brandt (Louis Jourdan). After a brief affair, which she takes for love, not seeing that he is just a philanderer, he leaves for a concert in Italy and never returns to the now-pregnant Lisa. She bears the child herself and later enters into a stable marriage, although one lacking the passion and love she still feels for Stephan. Ten years later, when he returns to Vienna, Lisa attempts, at the risk of her marriage, to see if he loves, or even remembers her. Fontaine and Jourdan perfectly project the feelings of a woman in love and a man too selfish to notice or care.

Written by Howard Koch, the co-author of CASABLANCA, from a novel by Stephan Zweig, LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN is generally described as a "woman's picture" because of its theme of unrequited love. But this somewhat pejorative description hides what in acting, writing, camera work, atmosphere and emotion is not just one of Max Ophüls' crowning achievements, but one the finest examples of how all elements needed to make a great film are brought together.

Keywords:

Olive Films

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Product Info

  • Sales Rank: 54,831
  • UPC: 887090046800
  • Shipping Weight: 0.25/lbs (approx)
  • International Shipping: 1 item

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